Zammuto

After releasing four critically acclaimed albums over the course of ten years, cellist Paul de Jong and guitarist Nick Zammuto announced the split of their experimental sound-collagist duo the Books this past January. In an interview with Pitchfork, Zammuto declined to go into details, stating, "It's been an extraordinarily painful year coming to the realization that there was no way forward for the band." Zammuto jumped right into a new project, though, a quartet that takes his surname and released a self-titled record in April. You can sense Zammuto's nervous anxiety in churning numbers like "F U C-3PO" (a few of the song titles have punny titles—"Too Late to Topologize," "Idiom Wind"), but it's a focused and direct record, with notably less sampling than the Books' material. Zammuto's smoothly pulsing vocals float like shiny bubbles on top of deep, placid pools of instrumentation. With AU. ERIN K. THOMPSON